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| photo by Element5 Digital |
Voting is Speech. A means, a mechanism of stating intentions, how one wants to live. Revolutions, uprisings also are means and mechanisms of stating intentions of how to live.
What we have been confronted with since the inception of the United States experiment is what has always been the dialectic of the human condition, its antagonisms, and contradictions as dynamic of its various parts. So the United States experiment created the Black American because of enslavement as a political designation meaning a construct of slaveholding law as contradiction to itself, in violation of its "all men are created equal" declarative for independence, but for the enslaved black people subjects, an antagonism.
To Thomas Jefferson who as author of the "all men are created equal" declarative, theoretically speculated on the inalienability of man's liberty while enslaving Black people the declaration was simply a hypocrisy, a contradiction. While for the enslaved black person what was a simple hypocrisy and contradiction which Thomas Jefferson had the intellectual-liberal indulgence of simply ignoring or being anguished by was an antagonistic-subjugated fact of life which could not be resolved with the speech of voting, but only revolution and uprising which the enslaved Nat Turner in 1831 gave us it's practice.
So we fast forward to the 21st century and 2020 where Black America is not subject to the chattel antagonism of slavery but firmly occupying a contradictory relationship within the United States experiment. Just as James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams and Co. of the dusty dead white men participant in the formation of the United States shared political-economy and social commonalities. They also shard and held contradictory relationships with each other and within their work forming the United States of which Federalist papers reveals. The point being, contradiction as dialectic is the operative with any society and its resolution is point, counterpoint, debate, and argument culminating in voting is speech.
The fact Black America has historically participated in voting is speech, means and mechanism of stating its intentions and how it wants to live while not reaping minuscule reward for its participation and labors is not indictment of voting as impotent and farcial means or an affirmation of a formative dialectic of the nation. Instead what it reveals is an intrinsic absence of motive understanding and grasp of the national contradictions which as it existed between Thomas Jefferson and Co. currently also exist waiting to be resolved, reformed, and exploited by capable and able perspectives.
Currently, there is a reemerging tendency which has parochially existed to the determent of Black America that innocuously states, voting is an exercise in futility. As election day 2020 approaches it's Fifth Column foot soldiers, collaborators i.e The Breakfast Club Show, Sean P. Diddy Combs, elements of a type of Black Nationalist, and the usual cabal opponents of Black America's assertiveness and its objective political-economy are beating their chest, gnashing their teeth, howling that voting is a trick and should be shunned by Black America.
This 2020 version of the tendency is posisted under the banner, Black America should stop voting Democrats because Democrats have not advanced Black America's interest. The only thing this argument reveals and exposes besides its obvious nature as ploy to dissuade Black America voting because the same thing isn't said about Black America and church or religion in general. Because as diligently as Black America goes to church and participates in religion the narrative consistently remains the same and the Democratic Party has produced more advancement for Black America than church and religion. So what we are faced with is the paternalistic condescension of proponents of the anti-Democratic Party arguments. As if the Democratic Party is supposed to in and of itself paternalistically know what is best for Black America without demand and push from rank and file organized advocacy engaged in open political action. Secondly, scheming a disassociation of Black America from the Democratic Party ensures the supremacy of the Republican Party and it's reactionary, retrograde, reprobate, misanthropic policies that only entrench racism and bigotry.
What commentators as The Breakfast Club, Sean P. D. Combs should do is immerse in a study of materialist political-economy then subsequently observe and analyze missteps in and failures of American Foreign Policy because insight will be gained and will shed clarity on how we vote and what we vote for.
Abandoning the vote is a non-starter and is beyond stretching the neck on the guillotine.
By William Thorpe
